In case you're wondering, the software I used to create this blog is called BlogEngine.Net. It is a completely free and open source blogging tool built on Microsoft's ASP.Net web development platform. I looked at several blogging tools before this one, including the Blog Starter Kit, DasBlog and even Windows Live Spaces.

I chose BlogEngine.Net because it seemed to offer the right combination of simplicity and control, together with a cool selection of themes, which you can completely customise to your heart's content.

I'm using my current project at work to experiment with test-driven development. After some initial research, I settled on the popular nUnit unit testing framework. Installation was trouble-free, but getting the tool to integrate into Visual Studio 2005 was impossible and it seems this isn't an uncommon issue. I got the console version working as an "External Tool" on the Tools menu, but for some unknown reason, the GUI version wouldn't work and I kept getting a "FileNotFoundException" when trying to run my tests. After some tinkering, I eventually got the GUI version to run my unit test project. To save you having the same problems I had, I've listed the steps I went through below:

• Set the unit test project to be the startup project
• Open the "Project Properties" page and click the Debug tab
• In the Start Action section, select "Start external program" and enter the path to the nUnit GUI executable file
• Set the "Command line arguments" to the name of the unit test project (.vbproj or .csproj)
• Set the "Working directory" to the path containing the unit test project

Save the project settings, hit F5 and hey presto! The nUnit GUI should fire up and load the assembly containing your tests, ready to run.

Started back at work today. I doesn't take long for the Christmas feel-good factor to wear off when you're having to deal with the usual staff issues and problems. There seems to be a winter bug going round that is affecting the whole Council. It's called Norovirus and sounds particularly nasty. I hope I don't get it!

I'm hoping to start working on a new development project, which is to design and create a new Contract Management database for the Commercial Waste team within the Council. Ideally, I'd like to use this project to try out some of the agile programming practices I've been hearing and reading about so much lately. I'm particularly interested in trying out test-driven development, but need to do a bit of research first to evaluate the various tools that are around.

If you can recommend a good (and free) testing tool that integrates with Visual Studio 2005, I'd like to hear about it.